Building Toward Demand: A More Complete Framework for Maritime and Defense Industrial Base Workforce

Written by Laura Schmiegel, SVP Strategic Partnerships, Orion Talent

THESIS

America's maritime and defense industrial base has invested significantly in building a workforce pipeline, and that investment must continue. But Orion’s experience over the past year as a partner to the MIB workforce placement effort has taught us that supply-side investment without a demand-side infrastructure is an incomplete solution. Building the workforce this mission requires means adding a mapped supplier network, technology that predicts and responds to demand signals in real time, and direct investment in the employer-side capacity to receive, develop, and retain talent.

THE PIPELINE INVESTMENT: WHAT HAS BEEN BUILT

The Navy's Maritime Industrial Base program, operating through BlueForge Alliance and a consortium of partners, has made substantial and effective investments in the candidate pipeline over the past several years. The results are significant. The ATDM program has graduated more than 614 trained and certified craftsmen from nearly 30 states, and is scaling toward 1,000 graduates annually in its new Danville, Virginia facility. State-level Talent Pipeline Programs in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Long Island, and Hampton Roads engaged nearly 300 small and medium industry partners and yielded more than 2,700 pipeline hires. A rebuilt Build Submarines platform now connects candidates to open roles across thousands of suppliers. National awareness campaigns have generated hundreds of thousands of views and tens of thousands of candidate inquiries. This impressive effort has produced rapid and impactful results. (BlueForge Alliance, FY2024 Submarine Industrial Base Program Year in Review, October 2024)

Orion Talent participated as one of several partners contracted to source veterans and transitioning service members into the BuildSubmarines pipeline and deliver hires to submarine industrial base suppliers. Orion screened more than 30,000 qualified candidates and submitted 1,300 to employers. The national pipeline exists. The talent is there and growing.

THE PLACEMENT GAP

Despite those 1300 submissions to employers, Orion's interview-to-hire conversion rate across this program was approximately 11 percent. This represents a large departure from both our historic conversion rate and the industry standard, which is 40 percent or higher. This gap is not explained by candidate quality, availability, or interest. The candidates submitted were screened, qualified, and ready to work. The gap is explained by three structural conditions.

The first is supplier mapping, engagement, and timing. Of more than 1,000 companies Orion contacted in the first year, the majority were either disengaged from the program or unaware that their work placed them within the maritime supply chain. It took six months to bring enough suppliers into active participation to begin meaningful recruiting. This was not for lack of effort by the MIB coalition, but rather because the entire map of shipbuilding suppliers in America is uncharted and opaque, especially for second or third tier suppliers.  Even among engaged suppliers, approximately 20 percent of open requisitions were cancelled or placed on hold, driven by uncertainty in work orders and contract flow-down. As Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America has testified, suppliers cannot commit to hiring timelines until their customers confirm production schedules, and a workforce program that does not account for that dynamic will always be out of phase with actual demand. (Paxton testimony, House Armed Services Committee, February 8)

The second condition is geography. MIB work is concentrated in coastal production hubs: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, parts of the Gulf Coast. Qualified candidates in skilled trades are distributed nationally. Relocation resistance is high, and most employers in this sector do not offer relocation assistance. Training programs produce graduates where the programs are located, not necessarily where the jobs are. A national awareness campaign can create a sufficient volume of candidates, but it cannot resolve a geographic mismatch between those candidates and available jobs.

The third condition preventing a higher conversion rate is supplier readiness. Smaller employers may lack a basic HR infrastructure: incomplete job descriptions, informal and drawn out interview processes and little applicant tracking. Building that infrastructure before recruiting begins is necessary but time-consuming. Larger employers may view outside recruiting support as competition rather than partnership. Supplier engagement requires the ability to address hiring challenges at all levels of the supply chain.

THREE INVESTMENTS THAT WILL CLOSE THE GAP

1. Better Supplier Mapping

The supply chain must be mapped in order to serve as a workforce planning asset.  In our experience, second and third tier suppliers in the MIB were invisible to even an engaged and invested coalition, and were often unaware of their own place in the supply chain. A centralized, tiered catalogue of MIB suppliers, organized by geography, product type, and hiring cadence, is the foundational investment the current model is missing in order to engage all levels of production.

Not all suppliers have the same hiring needs, and investment should reflect that distinction. Long-lead component suppliers, those producing parts that feed into multiple ship systems, carry persistent and predictable demand. Their backlogs are a direct leading indicator of downstream production delays, and they should be the program's first priority. Work-order-dependent suppliers require a predictive approach: monitoring contract flow-down, shipyard production signals, and acquisition instruments like block-buy contracting to anticipate when demand will materialize and begin building the relevant talent pool in advance.

Geographic investment must follow employer concentration. Permanently funded regional training hubs, concentrated in areas of heavy supply chain presence, provides the demand signal that allows future candidates to make informed decisions. This would also encourage more state and local investment in local housing, schools and other amenities.  Relocation is a much easier prospect for candidates when they know they are moving to a location that will support their families’ growth.

2. Better Technology and Metrics:

The recruiting profession has a well-developed framework for measuring whether a hiring system is working. The core metrics are screening-to-submittal ratios, submittal-to-interview conversion, interview-to-hire rates, offer acceptance rates, time to fill, cost per hire, and first-year retention. These exist because placement counts are insufficient to diagnose where a system is succeeding or failing. The MIB program currently measures success primarily at the end of the funnel. That must change in order to focus resources on the specific problems preventing an employer or region from attracting a sufficient number of candidates.

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally expanded what a recruiting platform can do. AI-enabled systems can ingest systemic data to model where hiring demand will materialize before requisitions formally open. Machine learning platforms can identify candidates most likely to succeed in specific roles, improving match quality and reducing early attrition. Across the pipeline, AI can automate much of the sourcing and scheduling process, freeing recruiters to focus on the judgment-intensive work that technology cannot replace.  Technology-assisted recruiting creates a scalable, cost-efficient model that leverages the expertise of human recruiters at points in the process where they are essential to success. That combination is what a mature workforce infrastructure looks like.

3. More Investment in Supplier Readiness and Retention

The Navy’s Talent Pipeline Programs are a promising and effective model for employer-side investment. TPP programs in five regional markets engaged nearly 300 suppliers and produced measurable improvement in hiring and retention. Programs that help employers, especially smaller ones, develop systems to attract, hire, develop and retain talent will improve hiring and most notably retention, easing the burden on the long term pipeline.

Training investment must extend beyond initial qualification. ATDM and similar programs produce entry-level graduates who need continued development to become the experienced workers employers actually need. Future program design should also ramp-up training at the point of hire such as federal apprenticeships, giving employers the support to take a candidate fresh out of a four-month program and develop them into a productive, skilled tradesperson over their first year.

Employers who cannot describe a career path at their company, who offer no structured onboarding, and who have never mapped the skills progression from entry level to journeyman will lose workers before any of these investments pay off. Potential investments to improve in this area include readiness assessments; job description development and compensation benchmarking; and structured onboarding support particularly for smaller suppliers absorbing entry-level workers.

Finally, retention metrics should be reported alongside placement numbers in every program review. Ninety-day, 180-day, and one-year retention rates, tracked by employer, supplier tier, and geography, are the measure of whether the full investment is actually working. A hire that leaves in ninety days resets the clock on every dollar spent to produce it.

Archives

RSS Feed

Subscribe to Orion's Blog